Sun 20 Dec 2020
Pulp Stories I’m Reading: ROBERT R. MILL “Murder on the Island.â€
Posted by Steve under Pulp Fiction , Stories I'm Reading[11] Comments
ROBERT R. MILL “Murder on the Island.†Short story. “Tiny†David #1. [Corrected to #2. See Comment #1.] First published in Blue Book, May 1933. Collected in Murder on the Island and Other Stories of “Tiny†David and the Black Horse Troop (Black Dog Books, paperback, 2004).
We don’t get to see any of the Black Horse Troop in this, the first story of 47 in all, all appearing in Blue Book magazine between 1933 and 1942. The Black Dog collection contains only four of them. The rest I imagine I’ll never get a chance to read, never having collected the magazine, and the ones I did own for a while are long gone.
In this one, we meet only Trooper Edward David and his immediate superior, Sergeant James Crosby. The setting is somewhere in the Adirondacks in New York State, as Tiny and the sergeant are rowing to an isolated island where a wealthy man and his daughter are living, along with several servants. Disliking publicity, visitors are generally not welcome, but an urgent telephone call from Joseph Bahn has them heading that way in rowboat, and in a hurry.
Once there they find the body of the Bahns’ butler, dead, having been shot in the head. Although six foot two and weighing 220 pounds, “Tiny†David may appear lazy and slow-witted, but he’s one observant fellow, a lot sharper than his sergeant, and when he senses that something is wrong with the scenario they’ve been presented with, you can count on his sense been exactly right.
What this story turns out to be is a perfectly ordinary detective mystery, a rather light-hearted approach that even without a challenge to the reader, an equally observant reader can see and interpret the same clues that Tiny does.
For more on the author and the series, here’s a link to Sai Shankar’s Pulpflakes blog and his essay on both:
https://pulpflakes.blogspot.com/2017/01/robert-r-mill.html
December 20th, 2020 at 8:45 am
Thank you for a good review!
I first learned about Robert R. Mill from ONTOS:
http://carrdickson.blogspot.com/2020/03/just-like-story-book-detective-arent-you.html
That article has links to a couple of Tiny David tales online at archive.org. These include “Murder on the Islandâ€.
I agree with you that “Murder on the Island†is a pure detective story of traditional structure. My little article on Mill compares the solution to Ellery Queen. See:
http://mikegrost.com/police.htm#Mill
The ONTOS article cites FictionMags at saying the Tiny David tales had started by 1929. If true, “Murder on the Island†can’t be #1 in the series.
December 20th, 2020 at 9:49 am
It appears that Michael Tooney at ONTOS is correct:
The following story would seem to be part of the Tiny David series, and from the title, fairly obvious the first:
Enter: Tiny David, (ss) The Blue Book Magazine Jul 1929, as “The Gilman Caseâ€.
[Reprinted in] The Blue Book Magazine Oct 1942.
And re the Ellery Queen connection, you made it directly, while I made only the “challenge to the reader” reference.
December 20th, 2020 at 9:57 am
Hi Steve,
Good to see a “Tiny” David story reviewed here. It feels like Mills had fun writing them, and i had fun reading the few I did.
I enjoyed them more as light-hearted tales of a group of troopers. As the series develops, their Captain (who is permanently annoyed by David and keeps thinking up new ways of punishing him) and other troopers become a recurring cast with their own quirks and foibles.
There is a certainly a detective angle to quite a few of the stories, and they can be enjoyed that way as well.
It just goes to show the variety of 1930s Blue Book that you could have story from a series like this, historical series from H. Bedford-Jones, Tarzan or his clones, a Foreign Legion story and an adventure from James Francis Dwyer, all in the same issue.
The covers are artistic, and the contents are quite readable. And the illustrations, oh my goodness, are outstanding. The cover design is staid, but you can’t have everything, can you?
And if you could, it would be unaffordable. As it is, issues are reasonably cheap and easily available. You could put together a run of the 1930s in decent shape quite quickly.
Get a few issues. You won’t regret it.
Best wishes for this festive season and the coming New Year – it surely can’t be as bad as this one.
December 20th, 2020 at 10:45 am
Glad you enjoyed my review, Sai. I was going to send you a note to be sure you saw it. In my collecting days, I never realized how good the general fiction magazines were, BLUE BOOK, ADVENTURE, and SHORT STORIES. I started out collecting the science fiction ones, then the detective pulps and finally, but not necessarily least, westerns. I guess I thought the general fiction ones were too “literary’ and not pulpish enough. I eventually saw the error of my ways, but that came too late to start collecting them in earnest.
December 20th, 2020 at 11:50 am
Well, you didn’t make that mistake with the detective pulps. I got in the game too late to get bargains on them. Win some/lose some.
December 20th, 2020 at 12:37 pm
I had nearly complete runs of both BLACK MASK and DIME DETECTIVE from 1935 on, and quite a few scattered issues before that. But when I bought them, it was at premium prices, no bargains in the lot. As an unintended investment, though, I’m sure I did OK when I sold them. Probably better than the stock market, but I’ve never looked into that to be sure.
December 20th, 2020 at 12:43 pm
Thinking of DIME DETECTIVE’s, most of mine were purchased in the mid-70s. Here’s what Google just told me:
In terms of inflation, $6 in 1974 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $31.67 today, an increase of $25.67 over 46 years.
In other words, an increase by a factor of five. Anything above that is actual profit.
December 20th, 2020 at 2:40 pm
Mike Ashley, one of the great researchers and experts on fiction magazines, has written a long essay on Blue Book covering the history and authors. It is available from Amazon.com in Pulp Vault #14, Doug Ellis’ excellent pulp fanzine.
It’s one of the best things ever written about the pulps.
December 20th, 2020 at 2:44 pm
Yes, you’re right, Walker. A great essay by Mike Ashley. I double your recommendation.
December 20th, 2020 at 8:44 pm
Another tie between Ellery Queen and this is at least one EQ story appeared in BLUE BOOK though it was better known for adventure and Westerns with a little SF of the ERB kind than mystery.
December 20th, 2020 at 8:59 pm
If BLUE BOOK had included more detective fiction than it did, I probably would have saved the copies came across longer than I did.